HostPapa Review 2024: Why We Think It’s Not Good Enough

A Middle-of-the-Road Host: Is It Worth It for Your Website?

HostPapa has been around for a while, and there’s no denying it has made some drastic improvements to its service over the years. A few years ago, there’s no way I could have recommended HostPapa in good conscience. 

Now… well, I still wouldn’t recommend it above any of our expert picks for the best hosting providers in 2024 if you’re looking for many additional features to give your hosting an edge, but I have no qualms telling you that HostPapa is a perfectly acceptable hosting provider. It delivers decent performance – it just has little else that makes it stand out.

Targeted toward small business owners, and with a cutesy mustached logo and branding with names like the PapaSquad and PapaCare, you get the impression that HostPapa wants you to feel like a part of the family. It’s a cute hook. 

However, after signing up for HostPapa’s entry-level plan, setting up a test website, and continuously monitoring its performance for a little over a week, I found that when it comes to performance, there’s not much difference between its “family” and any other middle-of-the-road host.

Keep reading if you want to learn where HostPapa surprised us, for better or worse. 

With HostPapa, There’s Always a Catch

HostPapa offers a wide selection of plans. After all, it offers shared, managed and unmanaged WordPress, VPS, and reseller hosting. It’s not the largest selection I’ve ever seen, but it is pretty decent.

HostPapa has some nice features, but let’s be upfront and honest about two things. First, a lot of the best features aren’t available on the more affordable plans, and you’ll need to go for the top-tier plan if you want things like malware protection and automatic backups.

Second, many of the features aren’t quite what they seem. There are a few hidden catches that diminish HostPapa’s claims of being affordable and beginner-friendly.

Some Nice Freebies

Though most of HostPapa’s best features are locked behind the higher-priced plans, that doesn’t mean that you have to make big investments for everything. You get cPanel and the Softaculous one-click installer with all plans. To be fair, that’s the bare-minimum for a hosting provider, but at least it’s one less thing to worry about. You can also set up 10 free email addresses with the entry-level plan, which is more than what you’d normally get.

Entry-level plans include a free Let’s Encrypt SSL, while the higher-priced plans include a Wildcard SSL certificate in its place. All plans include free site migration if you’re transferring an existing site, and free domain registration if you’re starting from scratch.

There’s a catch, however, with the domain name. If you cancel before your plan’s term expires, you’ll have to pay the registration fee – but then again, this is pretty standard practice among hosting providers.

Jetpack Brings the Goods

If, like us, you’re using HostPapa for a WordPress site, you’ll also get the free Jetpack plugin preinstalled. It’s easy to use and packs a lot of good stuff like SEO and site optimization tools, a CDN for images, social sharing tools, downtime monitoring, and more.

It’s a nice feature, but to be honest, it doesn’t add any real value. HostPapa relies on it for a lot of its WordPress plan “features,” but it’s a free plugin so you can install it regardless of your relationship with HostPapa. For comparison, Hostinger includes the LiteSpeed Cache plugin1 for WordPress even on its entry level plans, which makes a noticeable improvement in your website’s performance and search engine rankings.

That said, if you go for the higher-priced Ultra plan, you’ll get the Jetpack Premium package which adds some useful extras like a CDN for video, automated malware scanning, automatic backups, and the ability to accept PayPal payments.

Plenty of Storage for a Small Business Site

The entry-level Start plan includes 100GB of SSD storage, which is plenty for a small- to medium-sized site getting 10 to 20K visitors a month. The top-tier plans offer unlimited storage, so there’s room to upgrade if your site suddenly takes off.

That’s pretty good on its own, but if you’re planning to launch a site with high storage requirements, like a photography studio or retail e-commerce operation, you could benefit more from a host like InterServer1, which offers unlimited storage even on its lower-priced plans.

PapaCare+

For an extra monthly fee, you can access the PapaCare+ program. It’s a VIP-type support program that shared hosting customers are eligible for. It includes:

• Help with email setup
• cPanel assistance for things like redirects and spam filters
• Installation of CMS like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla
• Exploit protection for apps like WordPress
• Overall domain management issues
• Front-of-the-line priority for all your support and security issues

And for once, there’s no catch or hidden anything. You pay for it alongside your monthly hosting fees and it’s yours as long as you want it.

HostPapa Features at a Glance

Like Everything Else With HostPapa, There Are Ups and Downs

Let’s begin by saying that cPanel is cPanel and WordPress is WordPress. If you have any experience whatsoever with either cPanel or WordPress, you won’t have too much trouble setting up your site with HostPapa. If you’re a beginner, however, you may find yourself visiting the knowledge base more than you’d care to.

Creating a New Account With HostPapa

Creating a new account with HostPapa wasn’t difficult in any way. It did, however, have one issue worth noting. As part of the signup and checkout process, two upsells are auto-selected. I had to uncheck them or be charged a good deal extra for things we didn’t want.

HostPapa also asked if it could share our personal data with a company called “Promo People Inc.” – I politely declined.

Signing up and paying for the account was otherwise straightforward and didn’t take much time. If you’re starting from scratch, you’ll be prompted to choose your free domain name before completing your payment. Once you get to the checkout screen, you have the option to pay with Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Alipay, or PayPal.

Connecting a Domain and Installing WordPress

Here’s where things got a little weird. The first link in the intro email led me straight to HostPapa’s dashboard. From the dashboard, it’s easy to find the MyWordPress link, which leads you to cPanel. From there, I used Softaculous to install WordPress. Umm, wait a minute…

All HostPapa WordPress plans are supposed to come with pre-installed WordPress, yet I had to DIY my own installation.

According to support, I was supposed to receive WordPress login details in the welcome message confirming our account setup. I reviewed the welcome message again and the link to the HostPapa dashboard was front and center, while the link to the WordPress admin account came further down. I had clicked on the first link, as most would, eager to get started.

This wasn’t much of a problem for us, but could be a significant problem for a newbie. I’d like to see HostPapa merge the links to the dashboard and to the pre-installed instance of WordPress in the same sentence so that new customers don’t miss it.

I questioned support about this once I thought preinstalled WordPress wasn’t included, and were told about the preinstalled account that I hadn’t used. Oh well. End of the story is I got my little 1 MB test page up and running, without ever knowing I had a pre-installed WordPress account waiting for me.

A Proprietary Website Builder, But Not For Everyone

HostPapa includes Site Publisher (its custom website builder) with every plan, which should in theory make setting up your site easier. The downside here is that it’s not compatible with WordPress. Site Publisher might be easy to use and have all kinds of features, but it won’t be of any use to WordPress hosting customers.

Even though the MyWordPress link leads you to cPanel, and you’ll find the Site Publisher right there on the cPanel dashboard, it’s not a WordPress-based builder. This might not seem confusing, but it may be more than a tech newbie could manage.

It might, however, help you get started if you don’t want to use WordPress. But be warned that you can only use it to build two pages if you’re on one of HostPapa’s lower-tier plans.

Domain Setup Was Easy Enough

Every account comes with a domain name that is free for the first year, and HostPapa takes care of the setup on that one for you. So there was little to do there. If you’re installing WordPress manually (as I ended up doing), you’d simply enter your domain name during the Softaculous installation process, and it is automatically connected to your webspace.

The Ups and Downs Continue

HostPapa’s data centers are located in California, the Netherlands, and Burlington, Ontario, Canada, the location of the company’s head office. This gives it a nice range for North American and Western European site owners. I hosted my site on the Canadian server, and my results were based on that server’s performance. If you’re like me and enjoy getting deep into the nerdy details, you can check out our explanation of how we test our sites.

In a week of testing, my results recorded a typical loading speed of 1.8s and an uptime of 99.98%. In terms of loading speed, this wasn’t great, but in terms of uptime, this is an excellent score.

GTmetrix

I used the GTmetrix server in Chicago, IL, for my tests, since I had chosen to host my site on servers in HostPapa’s Canadian data center. One rather unpleasant surprise was the Time to First Byte score of 1s. Given the proximity of the Chicago GTmetrix server and the Burlington, Ontario datacenter, I was expecting something better.

Another surprise was all of the ups and downs in a week of testing. As you can see, I recorded a range of Fully Loaded times from less than 1s to almost 3s. Granted, only a few results were above the expected norm of 2s. Overall, my typical daytime loading time was 1.8s, resulting in a B score.

UptimeRobot

HostPapa guarantees an uptime of 99.9%. Nothing new or different from most hosts there. What I found was a 30-day overall score of 99.98%. That was quite a pleasant surprise, given the middle-of-the-road experience we’d had so far.

These mixed results aren’t bad, but they’re not good enough to move HostPapa from the middle of the pack.

More Mixed Results

HostPapa offers a range of support channels, including chat, phone, email, and even snail mail. The service claims to have 24/7/365 support, and seems to live up to that in my experience. I like to test support during both typical “workday” hours and “off hours” like evenings and weekends.

You can already see how helpful chat support was in the whole “is WordPress pre-installed or not?” debacle. The chat support agent was online in seconds, and had satisfactorily resolved the issue within moments.

What’s impressive is that all of this happened during “off hours” – after 7pm on a weekend evening.

On the other hand, email support was much less impressive. It took a total of 5 messages back and forth to get my issue with WordPress Toolkit resolved. When I couldn’t get cPanel’s WP Toolkit to find and recognize the test site, I sent a support ticket with a simple question: “how do I get WP Toolkit to find and recognize my site?”

Email support responded 1 hour and 4 minutes later, on a Monday afternoon no less. Not bad, as sometimes you can be waiting days for a response, but it’s much slower than the “10 minutes” advertised. I wouldn’t mind if the answer was helpful, but it really wasn’t.

That’s how you install WordPress from Softaculous via cPanel. Nothing to do with WP Toolkit. It took five back-and-forth messages between Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning for the agent to understand. In the end, the agent just connected WP Toolkit to the test site for us. I hadn’t asked for that, but it was nice to have it done, finally.

One place that didn’t disappoint was HostPapa’s online knowledge base and Customer Care Centre. There’s even a separate knowledge base for WordPress site owners, linked directly from the WordPress hosting plans page on the website. There are over 3000 articles in the knowledge base in general, and over 250 directly related to WordPress.

The Customer Care Centre provides access to a range of support options and helpful information. It’s awesome to have access to several video tutorials that are really useful and cover all the essential information you need when starting out.

Then there’s the PapaCare+ service, the premium support service you can pay a monthly fee for, which we’ve already mentioned. Plus, HostPapa has one last support feature that goes above and beyond what we’d expect from an otherwise middle-of-the-pack hosting service – one-on-one training. Granted, it’s one of those services you can only get with a higher-priced plan, but you can get a free 30-minute session with a support team member to walk you through any issue you may be having.

Overall, support may be the one place where HostPapa makes an overt attempt to be better than the rest of its middle-of-the-pack competitors.

A Budget-friendly Price for the Small Business Owner

HostPapa offers plans ranging from 30 days to 3 years. You pay the least expensive fees, of course, for the longest-term plan. Occasionally, HostPapa will offer one of its middle-tier plans for a price that matches that of the tier below. It’s worth waiting for if you can, given all the goodies that come with the higher-priced plans. Overall, HostPapa’s prices are fairly inexpensive, regardless of promotions.

In terms of a money-back guarantee, HostPapa is pretty standard. You can request a full refund within the first 30 days on any plan over one year. For plans of less than one year, you only get 48 hours from the time of payment. Money-back guarantees apply to all types of hosting. You can also receive a full refund on several of HostPapa’s non-hosting services, as well, such as PapaCare+ and the paid website builder.

All in all, HostPapa’s prices aren’t bad. I would’ve given a higher score if not for the middle-of-the-road value. But then, you sometimes get what you pay for.